The knowledge of good and evil

Have you ever wondered what that whole Genesis thing is about? You know the bit where because of their disobedience, Adam and Eve receive the knowledge of good and evil. Why is this bad and what did this cause?
Well Adam and Eve's problem was that they either a) Didn't really trust God when he told them to leave the tree alone or b) They thought they could handle being disobedient (sound familiar).
Anyway, they disobeyed and what they received was autonomy, rather than have to rely on God for direction and discernment, God gave them the ability to discern and direct themselves. Not much changed there over the years. What we now have is the ability to decide what is right and what is wrong. That doesn't sound too bad except of course, that mechanism, as correct as it is, relies on an amount of knowledge about the situation - knowledge we rarely have.
For example, suppose you are a judge in court and somebody comes in for a serious burglary and you have to sentence them. You might well decide that the person seems sorry for what they did and give them a light sentence. With the best of your knowledge, this seems fair and square. A different judge however might decide that it is 'right' to make an example of them because the crime was serious. Note here that neither person is necessarily wrong. We would call this a grey area.
In life, we see this all the time. Debates, arguments and politics are all confused and corrupted by the simple fact that one person's right is another person's wrong (as well as deliberate and malicious intent). So we end up with what looks like an unwinnable situation. It is not a matter of simply saying, "It is up to person X to decide" because if we feel strongly enough that they are wrong, we feel the need to object as the numbers of Court appeals show. The best we can hope for is a strong consensus among people.
Well for believers, we have another recourse. God is still alive and kicking and He actually knows all of the factors. If He were judge, we would decide the correct sentence knowing exactly whether the person is sorry and whether the example would work on other people. What do we need to do then? Very simply, we need to defer most of our judgements and decisions to God and let the Spirit and the Bible direct what we decide. This is the nearest we will ever get to impartial judgement.